The Entrepreneur's Guide To Modern Marketing. Justin Theng

      Download this worksheet and the others you need in this book at academy.growthcoaches.co/worksheets

      Grab a print-out, or iPad, and pen, and let’s now go through it together.

      A Quick Overview Of The Sections

      To start off, we will give the persona a name in the top left. It’s just a name that helps you remember who it is you’re talking about. For this example let’s imagine you are the Chief Marketing Officer of a clothing label. Let’s make something up for our customers and call the persona, ‘Shopper Sarah’ who obviously likes to shop. Now imagine that from now on, everyone within your organisation, from the sales and marketing team to the CEO, refer to your ideal customer as Shopper Sarah. No more terms like “target market” or “audience” which in most contexts is too vague and impersonal. A casual conversation between your teams could sound like this:

      Team member 1: Is this a good headline for the campaign ad?

      Team member 2: Would shopper Sarah like it? Would shopper Sarah resonate with it?

      At this point, without a Buyer Persona, you could go in circles debating to pros and cons of a few words strung together in various combinations. You’ve probably experienced some version of this scenario at some point. Now with a Buyer Persona, you can change that conversation. You could instead ask:

      At this point, you may start asking why it is important for you to know the details of her life, when you’re just trying to sell her, say, a new item of clothing from your brand. Why do you need to know whether your buyer has a family, is married or has children? Well, there are two answers to that.

      The first, is that you always want to bring your marketing back to the fact that you are selling and helping real-life people. These citizens of planet earth have their own lives and concerns beyond your product. It sounds obvious, be how often we forget that clothing isn’t just about style, but practicality when you‘re a busy parent with a toddler who doesn’t see the difference between a Kleenex and your brand new outfit. Another consideration for instance, could be that one of the genuine concerns of your Buyer Persona might be that they’re time-poor, not just because they work a ton. It could also be because on the weekends, they're busy with their family. Or it may be that after 5:00 PM, it’s the wrong time to communicate with them.

      The second reason is that Facebook knows whether your target audience has a family or are married and so on. By mapping out these attributes in your Buyer Personas, it allows us to tell Facebook “Hey Facebook, when you show our ads, please target people with a family or who are married.”

      Other aspects of their personality (as you glance around your worksheet you’ll notice) that we need to know about include:

      Okay let’s leave the clothing label world for a second and now let’s pretend you sell cleaning products. A buyer’s frustration may not necessarily be that they have no cleaning products. It could be that when people come over to their house, they’re always caught off guard and they need to quickly clean up. They may be frustrated that their work-life balance is out of whack.

      So when you’re creating a marketing strategy for these buyers, don’t (as a lawyer might call it) ’lead the witness’. Meaning don’t bake your assumptions about their answers into your question. The conversation should never sound like this:

      “So you don’t have any cleaning products, do you? No? Well, funny you should mention that...I happen to sell xyz cleaning products.”

      You want to talk to your buyers as real people. They have a family, their kid is a cereal spiller. There’s cereal everywhere all the time. This is a genuine frustration. You know this because you’ve noted that they have a family. When you’re selling to your Buyer Persona, you can recognize the fact they’re time-poor and their home is sometimes out of control. And that’s totally fine.

      The next thing you’ll be looking at are the traits, which are the identifying tell-tale signs about your Buyer Persona. Imagine that you are going to a room full of a hundred people. In that room, there are 10 people who are perfect candidates for your product or service.

      How would you identify these people?

      This reminds me of the time when I was working with people in the banking world. I found that bankers travel with tanned chinos, boat shoes, and a brown satchel or a dark polo. I don’t know why. It just seemed to be the travel outfit for bankers. At that time at least. That would have been a trait that I would have said in a room of 100 people, would help me Identify bankers. But more than outward appearances, people have other signals too, that identify them as one persona or another.

      Some traits are fun and lighthearted, like the bankers’ traits. Other traits could be more serious. For instance, when you talk to a lead, they may say things about the business like “I wear too many hats in my business.” This would indicate that they are a Persona of a smaller (or newer) organisation where the owner does everything.

      Next, you want to have a look at what you can do. What can you as a business do for them, ergo, what is your marketing message to them? What can you spell out that is going to address some of their objections, as well as some of their frustrations? You then narrow it down to the elevator pitch.

      Don’t worry about not getting all the perfect words. Done is better than perfect. Focus on the stickiest way to say what it is you can do for them.

      The next items on the worksheet are:

      Now Onto The Advanced Sections

      On the right of the worksheet, you see some scales:

      You need to do this because at the core of anything that a human being does, there is at least one of six basic human motivations. People are either driven by a quest for: